Free Sentry Peak by Harry Turtledove Page B

too.”
    The divisional commander stared at him. “Your Excellency, this is your scheme,” Bell reminded him. “Have you no faith in it?”
    “With the way the war has gone, my view at this stage of things is that any man who has faith in anything but the gods is a fool,” James answered. “What I have is hope, a more delicate, more fragile flower.”
    He might as well have started speaking the language of the camel-riding desert barbarians of the western continent, for all the sense he made to Brigadier Bell. Well, that was the advantage of being a superior officer. Bell didn’t have to see the sense in his words. All he had to do was obey. And he could be relied upon for that.
    Getting James’ effects ready to move took some doing: he had a great many more effects than his troopers did. Even with some serfs from Broadpath helping knock down the pavilion and load it and its contents into a couple of wagons, he felt rushed and harried. But he couldn’t very well require of the men what he did not match himself. And so, mounted on his big-boned unicorn, he led the march out of camp at sunrise the next morning.
    Lemon’s Justiciary was named after the stone fortress where an early Count Lemon had had his courthouse. A little town had grown up around the fortress after the local blonds were subdued, a little town that had got bigger when the glideway went through and the port was built a stone’s throw from that frowning stone keep.
    For ages, men had dreamt of flying. Those camel-riding desert barbarians had tales of flying carpets. But that was all they were: tales. Modern mages in Detina and in the kindred kingdoms back across the Western Ocean had finally persuaded carpets to rise a couple of feet off the ground and travel along certain sorcerously defined glideways at about the speed of a galloping unicorn. It wasn’t what poets and storytellers had imagined—but then, the real world rarely matched poems and stories. It was a great deal better than nothing.
    Or it would have been, had any carpets waited at the Lemon’s Justiciary glideway port. James and his men were there. Their conveyances?
    James set hands on hips and roared at the portmaster: “Where are they, you worthless, stinking clot?”
    “Don’t blame me, your Excellency,” the portmaster answered. “By the gods, you can’t blame me. Something must have got buggered up somewheres further north—in Nonesuch its ownself, or up in Pierreville north of there. I can’t give you what I don’t got.” He spread his hands. He went further than that: he pulled out the pockets of his pantaloons to show he had no traveling carpets hidden there.
    Cursing did no good. James cursed anyway. Setting his hand on the hilt of his sword did no good, either. That didn’t stop him from half drawing the blade. He said, “I can’t travel on what I haven’t got, either. And if I can’t travel, I can’t save the kingdom. The longer I have to wait here twiddling my thumbs, the longer the army has to wait here twiddling its thumbs, the greater the risk the war in the east will be lost past fixing. Well, sirrah, what do you say to that ?”
    With a shrug, the portmaster answered, “Only one thing I can say, your Excellency: I can’t do nothing about it.”
    The fleet of carpets finally glided into Lemon’s Justiciary nearer to noon than to sunrise. By then, James of Broadpath was about ready to murder the mages who piloted it. But that would only have made him later still getting to the northern border of Peachtree Province. And those mages, once he got a good look at them, proved plainly weary unto death. The southrons, being tradesmen ever ready to ship their goods now here, now there, had gone into the war with far more glideways and far more wizards able to exploit them than was true in the provinces that had declared for King Geoffrey. They’d got good use from them, too. Till he had to do it, Earl James hadn’t really worried about how hard it was to